Pieces of My Heart: A Life by Robert J. Wagner;Scott Eyman

Author:Robert J. Wagner;Scott Eyman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Entertainment & Performing Arts, General, United States, Personal Memoirs, Actors, Biography & Autobiography, Biography
ISBN: 9780061373329
Publisher: It Books
Published: 2009-09-02T03:26:12+00:00

Next up was The Biggest Bundle of Them All, with Raquel Welch and Edward G. Robinson, which also gave me a welcome reunion with Vittorio De Sica.

Eddie Robinson, of course, was just a wonderful actor, and he was also the most cultured and elegant of men. He had amassed one of the finest art collections in Hollywood when a toxic divorce forced him to sell most of it off. He sold Van Gogh’s Sunflowers to Stavros Niarchos, with the proviso that once Eddie got back on his financial feet he would be able to buy it back for the same amount of money Niarchos had paid him.

A few years later, Eddie had the money, but he could never get Niarchos on the telephone. It doesn’t matter how much money a chiseler may have—he’s still a chiseler. Eddie went on to rebuild his collection. He converted his garage into an art gallery, and he was the proud owner of a three-panel Water Lilies by Monet.

Raquel was a very difficult woman; her career was at white heat, she was only twenty-five or twenty-six years old, and as a result she was terrified. Her fear manifested itself in her constant lateness. She would be in makeup for hours while she kept everybody waiting. It was the same behavior that gradually alienated people from Marilyn Monroe, who was probably driven by many of the same fears.

Yet, as difficult as it was working with Raquel, I liked her and felt sorry for her. She didn’t seem to have the tools she needed to handle her life. She asked me once about a painting she was interested in buying, and I told her a story that Eddie Robinson had told me, about how purchasing a painting can change your life.

Eddie had been a struggling young actor in New York when he scraped the money together to buy a small Cézanne. He took it home and hung it over his mantel, then realized it didn’t look quite right. He changed the mantel, and the painting did indeed look better. Then he realized that the room wasn’t quite right, so he got new furniture that was more in keeping with the painting and the mantel. This went on until he moved to an entirely different apartment, just so he could properly showcase the Cézanne.

“You can’t worry about the value of the painting appreciating,” I told Raquel. “You just have to make sure that the painting feeds you in some way; you have to buy something you genuinely like, that you want to see every day. And if you can find a painting like that, then you have to have the right place to display it, and that’s how a painting can change your life.”

I told her all this, and she looked at me and said, “I don’t have any of that. How can I get that?”

Well, it helps if you have someone you trust to lead you through things. I had been lucky—Barbara Stanwyck, Clifton Webb, Natalie, and a lot of other special people had lent me their good taste until I could develop my own.

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